Sunday, August 24, 2014

The stately Mayflower Hotel at 1127
Connecticut Avenue has played host to a large
variety of prominent international figures, European Royalty, US Presidents,
and Hollywood stars.In 1942, it also housed a German spy named
George John Dasch, left, who checked into room 351 on June 18, 1942 with the intention of a meeting
with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to reveal his spy mission, coined Operation
Pastorius.

Dasch never met with Hoover,
who unbeknown to him, lunched every day in the Hotel’s dining room.Instead, Dash went to the FBI headquarters
and was directed to meet with an FBI agent named Duane L. Traynor.

Construction of the
$5 million dollar Mayflower Hotel at 1127 Connecticut Avenue began in April of
1923 by developer Allen E. Walker.He
hired the New York architectural firm of Warren & Wetmore to design the hotel,
which featured 400 individual rooms.In
addition, the hotel offered 100 large apartments for rent, as was typical of
hotels during the era, and whose occupants entered through a separate entrance
on DeSales Street.The apartment section
took up the entire eastern half of the building, facing 17th
Street.Since its opening,
the Mayflower had held inaugural balls for every President since Calvin
Coolidge in 1925.In the 1950s, the
hotel converted most of the apartments into individual guest rooms; however,
two apartments remain to this day in the hotel.

Dasch’s true story, revealed in detail over the next several days while
under constant surveillance at the Hotel, would eventually shock citizens all across
the country.Dasch, a German-American
citizen, had returned to Germany
at the beginning of WWII, as did many people with allegiance to their
Fatherland.He and seven others were
then chosen by the Führer to participate in a sabotage training school led by
Walter Kapp, former propaganda chief of the German-American Bund, an American
division of the German Nazi party.The
training took place beginning in the fall of 1941 at a former farmhouse at Quenz Lake,
west of Potsdam, Germany.

The intensive training consisted of laboratory studies in explosives, and
creating a variety of simple delay detonating switches using household goods
such as Chile saltpeter and sawdust, or dried peas and cork.Dasch was eventually selected as a leader of
a group of three other men, while a similar group was headed by a
German-American named Edward Kerling.After additional physical training and taking on aliases and tutoring in
American slang, the eight men learned that they were to be sent to America to
carry out their sabotage mission on factories, railroads, and bridges.

Their top secret mission was coined Operation Pastorius, named after Franz
Daniel Pastorius, a leader of the first group of Germans to arrive in America in
1683.The two groups of four men would each
be carried across the Atlantic Ocean beginning
on May 28, 1942
in German U-boats, the notorious submarines that had hampered transatlantic
travel for steamships for many years.

The trip would take seventeen days in cramp quarters and rough seas.Dasch’s group, on the U-202, would land
ashore near the Hampton’s
on Long Island, while the other, aboard U-584,
landed successfully at Ponte
Vedra Beach,
near Jacksonville, Florida.Dasch’s group used a rubber boat to get ashore from the U-boat, and
quickly buried an array of explosives and sabotage materials, but were met by a
Coast Guard patrolman who questioned them before allowing them to flee.Meanwhile, the U-boat had become stuck on a
sandbar, and droned its diesel engines until dawn in an attempt to drive itself
off the sand, and did so before the Coast Guard could muster up any resistance
along the unpopulated shore.

The saboteurs also carried with them huge amounts of American currency,
nearly $100,000 worth, to aid them in their mission.Dasch’s group headed to New York City, where they split up into two groups, and
proceeded to buy clothes, stay in upscale hotels, and visited many bordellos
and bars.Kerling’s group went
undetected at their landing, and proceeded to Chicago and then to New York, where they were to meet with Dasch
to begin their assaults on America
industry and transportation.Several
members also visited their families and former mistresses, much to their
surprise.

News of the botched Long Island landing was
kept secret from the public, and Dasch was worried that the authorities would
eventually track them down.So, he
hatched a plan to betray his fellow conspirators and called the FBI from New York to request a
meeting, thinking he would be hailed a hero for exposing the mission.They treated his call as a hoax, which
brought Dasch to the Mayflower Hotel on June 18, 1942 with the intention of meeting in person with
Hoover himself.

The FBI agent that met with Dasch first responded with trepidation, but as
details were revealed, and accounts from the Coast Guard confirmed his actions,
Dasch was followed in Washington
constantly as he dined, visited bars, and enjoyed his last days of
freedom.He eventually led the FBI to
the other seven saboteurs by revealing their predetermined meeting places in New York.
Dasch had been tricked into thinking that his guilty plea would save him
from a trial and eventual execution.Hoover called a press
conference in hast, and took credit for discovering the secret mission, to much
fanfare.President Roosevelt called for
a Military Tribunal to be held at the Justice Department building.Kenneth C. Royall of the War Department was
chosen to serve as their defense attorney, and the tribunal began on July 6, 1942.
Royall briefly succeeded in interrupting the Tribunal in an attempt to have
it moved to the Supreme Court, which was denied by the Court after a brief
hearing in which Hoover
attended.The prisoners were held in the
empty women’s section of the D.C. Jail, then located in SW DC.The tribunal meant that only limited and
controlled press releases were available to the public on the details of the
trial.

All eight saboteurs, including Dasch, were found guilty on August 2, 1942; the
following day Roosevelt accepted the outcome,
and sentenced six of them to death by electric chair.Dasch and a conspirator named Ernst Burger
were sentenced to long prison terms.However,
both the result and execution were kept secret from the public.He assigned General Albert Cox to oversee the
most dramatic mass execution in American history since the hanging of the Lincoln
conspirators.
On August 8, 1942,
six of the convicted saboteurs were electrocuted to death at the D.C. Prison’s
chair, nicknamed “old sparky,” in just over an hour’s time.The chair was kept in a niche above the
prison dining room as a constant reminder to the prisoners.Reporters, still not told of the outcome or
the planned execution, held vigil outside the prison and watched for a browning
of lights, indicating that electricity was being directed to the chair.
It was only later that day, at 1:27
p.m., as the White House Press secretary Steve Early read from a
typewritten sheet the outcome of the Tribunal, as well as the executions
already carried out, that the public learned of the prisoner’s deaths.Their bodies were buried in secret on the
evening of August 11th on the southernmost tip of the District, in a
pauper’s gravesite near Blue Plains waste water treatment center.They were marked with wooden headstones,
marked with numbers 276 to 281.

Dasch and Burger were eventually sent to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.In January 1945, prisoners threatened to
throw Dasch off the roof during an uprising, unless their demands were
met.President Truman pardoned Dasch and
Burger in April of 1948, and both were deported to a then devastated Germany.Dasch escaped into the Russian zone in
October of that year, and Burger wrote a letter to Hoover requesting a return to U.S. prison,
where food and housing were plentiful.Dasch published his account of Operation Pastorius in a 1959 book called
Eight Spies Against America; he died
in Germany
in 1992.Burger had died earlier, in
1962.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

The condominium building on the southeast corner of 13th
and T Streets has a storied past, and a respectable place in the history of
black Washington.It opened in July of
1919, offering African American travelers a stay in a first class hotel often
for the first time, in the segregated nation’s capital.The Washington Bee newspaper described it as
the “first hotel apartment of its size built for the exclusive use of colored
people in this country.”It was
constructed beginning in July of 1918 at a cost of $158,000.

The Whitelaw Hotel (and the Whitelaw market across the
street) both take their name from the financier and owner of the Hotel, black business
entrepreneur John Whitelaw Lewis.He had
formed and built the Industrial Savings Bank building at 11th and U
Street that remains to this day.Both
the Whitelaw Hotel and the bank were designed by a black architect, Isaiah T.
Hatton.Whitelaw created the Whitelaw
Apartment House Company with private stock to finance its construction.

The Whitelaw was constructed by J. C. Reeder, a black
builder who had a team of carpenters in which “every workman is colored,”
according to the Washington Bee.The
building operated as a hotel with entrance on 13th Street, and an
apartment building, with an entrance along T Street.

Duke Ellington's signature on the registry

The Washington Bee newspaper of October 5, 1919 described
John Whitelaw as “the first colored financier that has ever been a success in
Washington,” and revealed that Whitelaw had formed the stock company for blacks
to invest instead of the usual white financiers “so when this
prosperity…passes, they can see buildings towering skyward and say to the world
‘this is what we have gotten out of prosperity.’ ”Whitelaw had first come to Washington in 1894
with Coxy’s Army of the unemployed.

The kitchen

The Whitelaw featured an ornate lobby, and a restaurant/ballroom
that was a favorite choice for elite dinner parties and dances.Its clientele included many of the famous of
the day that performed at the Howard Theater and other venues on U Street - Cab
Calloway, Joe Lewis, and the neighborhood’s own native son, Edward Kennedy
(Duke) Ellington.The ballroom ceiling
was composed of an intricate domed skylight made of stained glass in yellow and
green hues.

The Whitelaw was purchased by Tally Holmes and others in
1934, who owned the building for the next several decades until it finally
became abandoned in the 1970s and 1980s, home to a wide variety of prostitutes
and drug dealers.The building was
documented as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey by the Library of
Congress in 1979, often a signal of its ultimate demise.It suffered a devastating fire two years
later, on December 15, 1981, in which two firefighters were injured.

Nearly ten years later, local black architect Rhonnie McGhee
designed a renovation of the Hotel into affordable apartments created by Manna,
Inc.The stained glass doom in the
ballroom was located in a neighbor’s garage, restored, and reinstalled into the
building.The early apartment renters
eventually were able to purchase their units as a conversion into a condominium
was implemented as envisioned by Manna.

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About Me

Paul K. Williams is the President of Historic Congressional Cemetery, and is also the proprietor of Kelsey & Associates, "The House History People," a small firm that specializes in creating a genealogy for a house or building; we research who built it and when, who designed it, who has owned it, and who has lived there and what they did for a living. We focus on the houses in Washington, DC and some other communities across the United States. I've published 19 books with Arcadia, History Press, and Anova Books on neighborhoods in
Washington and my hometown of Skaneateles, NY...titles below. We've
sold more than 45,000 to date! We're publishing Modern SW DC in the fall of 2016, and we are working on a "How to Research Your House History" book.
I've been the author of the popular "Scenes of the Past" column for the
InTowner newspaper beginning in April of 2001.
Visit us at www.WashingtonHistory.com